by hidden europe

Jewish passengers travelled hard class on the railways of eastern Europe one hundred years ago, enjoying none of the comforts of soft sleeping cars, but creating in the Russian train a very Jewish space - a perfect setting for Yiddish story telling.

article summary —

When the tsars sponsored the development of Russia’s great railways, the iron roads of authority that crisscrossed the empire and pushed ever further into the wilderness, they had Russian interests in mind. Mikhail Reutern, who had a long stint as Minister of Finance in the eighteen sixties and seventies, was a passionate imperialist and technophile who understood the importance of the train. He wrote to Tsar Alexander II advising that "without railways, Russia cannot be secure within her borders." Yet once the trains were running, what was to stop non-Russians climbing aboard, and diluting the imperial venture? The Jewish communities of Russian Poland and western Russia appropriated the railway into their own culture and consciousness, and some of the most evocative Yiddish travel writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focuses on trains and railway stations.

This year marks the centenary of the publication of one of the finest Yiddish novellas. Arum voksal ('Around the Train Station') by David Bergelson is an exemplary piece of railway travel writing.

This is just an excerpt. The full text of this article is not yet available to members with online access to hidden europe. Of course you can also read the full article in the print edition of hidden europe 28.

About the authors

Nicky Gardner and Susanne Kries manage hidden europe, a Berlin-based editorial bureau that supplies text and images to media across Europe. Together they edit hidden europe magazine. Nicky and Susanne are dedicated slow travellers. They delight in discovering the exotic in the everyday.

Readers of our e-brief have often asked us what else we do apart from hidden europe, so please indulge us as we give an example. Last year Thomas Cook Publishing, a company with which we always had enjoyed amiable relations, contracted us to take a ...

There is much talk today about how we live in a new age of the train, and that many journeys around Europe are now much more sensibly undertaken by rail rather than air. Only too true, but such rhetoric does imply that rail travel in Europe was ...

Europe has so many very comfortable train services, but it's really hard to trump the top-of-the-range Russian trains used on routes from Moscow to many cities in central and western Europe. For inner-EU journeys, these trains are often great ...